man again. The doors had been opened, and they allowed transit in both directions. He began to have ideas, interesting ideas in the same way that the ideas of the Marquis de Sade or Samuel Taylor Coleridge were interesting. Perverse, out-of-the-usual-run-of-things ideas that buffeted around his head like especially muscular butterflies, seeking expression. This was of the greatest torment to Harwell for, though he was as debauched and worldly as a man of his age and means could reasonably expect, though he was now illuminated by the truth of everything and was mere baby steps from comprehension, he was entirely talentless.
Musically, his attempts at ‘Chopsticks’ sounded like Stravinsky in a temper, his art was inferior to a manatee’s attempts at finger painting, and what his prose lacked in style, it also lacked in adverbs. The overall effect was that Eldon Harwell was a blocked spigot; a kettle filled with meaning and a cork down his spout.
Such a situation has driven greater men into the arms of madness, and opiates, and barmaids. Being a lesser man, Harwell succumbed to all three, before settling into a state of melancholia, from which his few remaining friends could not stir him.
In that dismal garret, he sat with his head in his hands, unable to articulate the vistas that moiled and slithered across his mind. At hand were a pen, ink and a half ream of cheap paper, for Harwell could at least spell and therefore clutched miserably at writing as an outlet. One day, he hoped and prayed, the boiling light he could perceive but not describe would resolve into coherence, and he would be its conduit. A great poem would pour from him, and leave him empty and peaceful. He also knew his next act would be to burn the manuscript before it could infect anyone else or, worse, reinfect him. As yet he had remained frustrated in this. Every attempt to shake loose the cosmic truth within him had resulted in a garbled mess or, on one occasion, a limerick about vicious but stupid crabs.
The curtains remained drawn at all hours. He feared seeing something else in the cemetery, so when the knock came at his door late one night, it surprised him terribly and he cried, suddenly fearful, ‘Who is there? Who raps upon my chamber door at this late hour?’
Beyond the portal, there came the muffled sound of a whispered conversation. Finally, a sepulchral voice intoned, ‘I . . .’ There was another pause, amid fierce muttering. ‘Which is to say, we . . .’
Then Harwell heard a new voice murmur something that sounded exasperated and possibly defamatory in German before saying, ‘Oh, just open the door, Herr Harwell. We have business to discuss with you.’
Reassured by the matter-of-fact tone, Harwell unlocked his door and slowly opened it to reveal four men whose identities must surely be apparent to all but the most inattentive reader. Johannes Cabal was the first in, impatient energy written into his every movement. He looked critically but silently around the room as Shadrach, Corde and Bose filed in behind him and stood uncomfortably with their hats in their hands as Cabal wandered about the place with long strides. At the window, he twitched the curtain back a crack and looked out over the crossroad for perhaps half a minute, before allowing the curtain to fall back into place. He stood in silent thought for a moment before saying, ‘We do not have a great deal of time, gentlemen. We are not the only party with an interest in Herr Harwell. We arrived barely in time.’
‘An – an interest?’ stammered Harwell. ‘Who has an interest in me? Who are you?’
‘Elucidation would be redundant,’ said Cabal. He snapped his fingers peremptorily at Shadrach. ‘The Key, sir! Quickly now.’
‘The key . . .’ It took a moment for Shadrach to take Cabal’s meaning. ‘The Silver Key?’
‘Of course the Silver Key,’ said Cabal, his patience burning away as quickly as a powder trail. ‘You do have it, do you not? If we have come all this way, and it is sitting on the dressing-table at home . . .’
‘Yes, of course I have the Silver Key, but it is useless without a gateway. Isn’t that true?’
Harwell glanced around the group, now at least partially convinced that he was hallucinating this indecipherable gang of men cluttering up his room. He hadn’t realised it was possible to suffer absinthe flashbacks, but it seemed the most likely explanation.
‘Yes, it is true, and there is a gateway here. The Key, if you please?’
‘A gateway,’ said Harwell. ‘In my room?’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Bose, as genial as Pickwick. ‘Your garret is home to a gateway to another world! Isn’t that wonderful? The land of dreams, no less.’ Shadrach shushed him, to no obvious effect.
Harwell’s expression showed dawning comprehension. ‘The land of dreams . . . the land of . . . Of course! It explains so much! My dreams, my visions! I understand now!’ He looked frantically around, turning on the spot. ‘Where is it? Where is this gateway? It must be near – I can feel it.’
Cabal meanwhile had accepted the Key from a reluctant Shadrach and was in the process of sliding it from the long chamois envelope in which it was kept. He let it lie in his hand for a long moment, feeling its weight wax and wane, watching the bittings ebb and flow, like crystals melting and re-forming. It was silver, certainly, but only in colour. What it was made of was an entirely different question.
He tucked the envelope into his coat pocket while taking a firm grip of the Key. ‘Yes, Herr Harwell. The Gate of the Silver Key is very close indeed.’
Harwell turned to him, his next question already forming on his lips, but he never had the chance to voice it. For Cabal raised the Silver Key to head height and, without hesitation, drove it between Eldon Harwell’s eyes.
There was no crunching of bone, no spraying blood or cerebral fluid as the Key slid through skin, subcutaneous fat, flesh, skull and brain. There was no sound at all, but for the collective horrified gasp of shock from the onlookers. It is not true to say that the Key’s passage between Harwell’s frontal lobes left no mark: the flesh and bone crumbled and melted into thin white smoke and what was left was nothing more or less than a neatly defined keyhole. None of them thought this strange at the time, but only afterwards in reflection; at that moment it seemed that the keyhole had always been there, obvious and apparent to them as soon as they had seen Harwell, yet somehow they had forgotten about it. It was a curious, half-formed memory, their first experience of the nature of the Dreamlands while waking, as its influence escaped through the opening gate into the mortal world like jasmine-scented air escaping a garden.
Only Cabal and Harwell made no sound, until Cabal turned the Silver Key in its lock and Harwell made a soft sigh as of realisation or perhaps recognition. Certainly, his eyes widened as though he could see things that had lain hidden from him his whole life. ‘It’s . . . beautiful,’ he whispered, and a solitary tear rolled down his cheek as the confused miasma of half-glimpsed possibilities that had haunted him since that night at the Pickman Gallery finally grew sharper in focus. ‘It’s all so . . .’
Then his face grew tense, the skin pulled back against the bone. ‘There’s something else, something else . . .’
